Reputation at stake

Tenet tell-all fascinating -- and frustrating

Tenet tell-all fascinating -- and frustrating

May 06, 2007|TIM RUTTEN Los Angeles Times

George Tenet, the former director of Central Intelligence, has written a memoir -- "At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA" (HarperCollins, $30) -- that calls to mind the old quip about the talking dog. What's truly remarkable about the performance is not so much what the dog has to say but that he speaks at all. The era in which CIA agents and their leaders took secrets to their graves is behind us, of course, but the notion of a DCI laying out his dealings with the president of the United States while the chief executive still is in office is something new under the sun. In that sense, Tenet's book is part and parcel of the astonishing number of tell-alls this loyalty-obsessed White House has spawned. That's hardly the most discomforting thing about Tenet's alternately fascinating and frustrating -- and very readable -- recollection. Far more disturbing is the fact that the country's former spook-in-chief remains disquietingly mystified by so many things -- not serious issues such as "Where is Osama bin Laden hiding?" but elementary questions touching on his own conduct in office. For example, on Sept. 12, 2001, then-CIA director Tenet arrived at the White House and encountered neoconservative firebrand Richard N. Perle, a passing acquaintance. As Perle was leaving, he paused to tell the spy chief that "Iraq must pay a price for what happened yesterday. They bear responsibility." Tenet wondered what Perle had been doing at the White House on such a day. By his own account, "I never learned the answer to that question." Similarly, he writes, "One of the great mysteries to me is exactly when the war in Iraq became inevitable." Really? Three years later, as Tenet prepared to resign, he considered his seven-year directorate and what he considered his accomplishments: "the rebuilding of a broken agency, the restoration of morale, the successes in Afghanistan and the larger war on terrorism, the takedown of (Pakistani nuclear scientist) A.Q. Khan and the neutralizing of WMD development in Libya," among others, he writes. "What I couldn't stop wondering was, had the president been convinced by some of his advisers that the blame (for the failure to find nuclear or biological weapons in Iraq) should be shifted to me? In the end, I will never know the answer to that question." Oh, come on ... Still, Tenet's account of his years with the CIA contains a great deal of real value and genuine interest on all those other questions. Like everyone else who served the United States through this era, however, his reputation will stand or fall on the Iraq question. And, in a dense "Afterword" that seems to bear the clearest marks of Tenet's hand, the former director speaks most directly to the issues likely to draw readers to his memoir. Concerning the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Tenet concludes: "The core of (the CIA's) judgments turned out to be wrong for 100 different reasons that go to the heart of what we call our 'tradecraft.'" He is unwilling, though, to see the agency shoulder any responsibility for the debacle that has followed Saddam Hussein's fall. Once on the ground, the CIA provided clear warning of a growing insurgency. The problem was that our warnings were not heeded. For too long our government was either unable or unwilling to look at new facts and transform its policy. As a consequence, a domestic insurgency in Iraq worsened daily and the political and military situation spiraled out of control. We followed a policy built on hope rather than fact." Tenet believes that the strategies now being pursued by the Iraq war's commander, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus -- known collectively as "the surge" -- might "have worked more than three years ago. The former intelligence chief is discreetly critical of the Bush administration's monochromatic view of Iran and skeptical about a policy toward Tehran based purely on confrontation. American diplomacy in the region has to include talks with Iran and Syria, Tenet contends. One of the administration's key failures in the Mideast, he writes, is not realizing that it's operating in a part of the world where you frequently need to "fight and talk" at the same time. His fascinating account of his service is studded with internal contradictions -- not so much contradictions of fact, as of the assessments drawn from the facts as stated. For example, he's keen to make the by-now not very controversial point that the circle of neoconservatives -- including Perle, Douglas J. Feith, Paul D. Wolfowitz and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby -- who accompanied Vice President Dick Cheney into the administration were set on war with Iraq when they came to Washington and seized on 9/11 as a pretext to realize that aim. All are long gone, yet the war proceeds as if they were still in positions of influence. That would seem to shift the focus to their patron, Cheney, yet in Tenet's account, the vice president is a shrewd and dedicated executive, strongly supportive of the CIA with a sophisticated grasp of intelligence work. Somehow even in this era, when the personal seems to trump all, one wants in a director of Central Intelligence just a little less conventional piety and sentimentality, and a slightly brighter glint of steel.